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GAZETTE
SEPTEMBER 1985
and conditions but that an extension of value or
amount exceeding 20% of the original contract
price or £100,000 (whichever is the lesser) shall be
subject to the approval of the appropriate special
sub-committee'.
At first we converted this to:
'The appropriate officer can extend contracts on
their original terms and conditions unless the
extension is by more than 20% of their original price
or £100,000. The appropriate special sub-
committee can approve extension above the limits.'
This took only 36 words against 50 in the original. It
was obviously an improvement and, technically, it was
absolutely watertight. Most people said we needed the
phrase 'whichever is the lesser' but this would have been
tautologous, not to say saying the same thing twice.
However, our version was not plain English because it
was capable of being misunderstood. Some clown would
have extended a contract worth £50,000 by £90,000 and
conveniently disregarded the 20% rule. To be accurate and
grammatically correct is not enough. Your words must
not be capable of misinterpretation by even the laziest
reader. We should have spotted the word 'unless' as a
danger signal. It indicates a negative construction and
that's always perilous.
Eventually we decided on:
'The appropriate officer can extend contracts up to
£500,000 on their original terms and conditions by
anything up to 20% of their original price.
4
He can also extend contracts over £500,000 on their
original terms and conditions by anything up to
£100,000.
'The appropriate special sub-committee can
approve extensions beyond these limits.'
This takes 52 words, slightly more than the original and
many more than our first version, but at least the meaning
is crystal clear.
In conclusion, writing plain English is an extremely
time-consuming business. Although our final efforts may
not look particularly awe-inspiring, they did take a
dedicated team of people four drafts and 160 man hours
to produce. We laboured, on average, for about five
minutes over every word.
It's not an easy task, indeed I think plain English
preachers haven't made enough of the difficulties facing
people in unscrambling our language. There are,
however, a few basic ground rules which I have set out
and illustrated in this paper.
The real key to writing plain English successfully, I
believe, is to do it as a team. One person working in
isolation, unless he or she is immensely talented and
persevering, cannot hope to succeed. You need others to
work with you, to challenge your drafts and to take over
when you begin to flag.
This necessarily demands flexibility and enthusiasm
from all the professionals involved, including lawyers
who, I have happily discovered, are just as capable of
these qualities as ex-journalists such as myself but go
about it a bit more quietly.
My final piece of advice to any new convert anxiously
waiting to tread the plain English road is to remember to
settle for nothing less than perfection as you see it. Once
you begin to compromise over the basic ground-rules
then you will be in trouble. Like the civil servants who
wrote the draft I referred to earlier, you may be
marginally improving on what had gone before but you
will be falling far short of the pinnacle of plain English.
The pay-off is that once you write plain English, it
works. People understand it and sometimes they even
express gratitude for your work. We had a memo from
our principal architect, whose section often uses our
revised document, congratulating us on 'an excellent job
and one long overdue'.
Plain English also cruelly exposes loopholes which
have been previously obscured by legalese. Some of the
loopholes we found had not even been spotted by the
council's assistant city solicitor until we started on our
exercise.
For Bradford Council there has been a literal pay-off as
well: we have already sold our plain English version to
more than 20 councils at £25 a time, and have more than
recouped the costs of the exercise. The Council have now
commissioned us to rewrite all the regulations on
contracts worth less than £15,000 and all the procedural
rules on council debates in the coming municipal year!
•
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